This section provides a general summary of background information and the comments and examples provided in this section are not necessarily prior art to the present disclosure.
Sports equipment, such as hockey and football equipment, readily develops odors, mold, and mildew after repeated use which can be often difficult to clean and dry using residential washers and dryers. Correspondingly, there has been a growing concern with the ability to adequately clean sports equipment as the spread of bacteria from the sports equipment to a user can often lead to serious health issues. As such, various commercial ozone cleaning systems have been specifically developed to clean sports equipment with ozone. In addition, other commercial ozone cleaning systems have been developed to clean bacteria from large spaces within a building as well as from other personal items such as clothing.
While commercial ozone cleaning systems of the type noted above operate satisfactorily for their intended purpose, these ozone cleaning systems are extremely large and fairly expensive to purchase and repeatedly operate. As such, these ozone cleaning systems are only feasible for commercial retailers, and thus are not readily available to the public for their personal use. Even in the instance that an ozone cleaning system is available to the public, it still requires that consumers commute to a commercial retailer to treat and clean their sports equipment and other personal items with the retailer's ozone cleaning system for a costly one-time fee.
As such, a recognized need exists to make further improvements to ozone cleaning systems in an effort to reduce their size and affordability and thus provide more access for the average consumer to clean their personal items with an ozone cleaning system. To this end, a specific need exists to develop an ozone cleaning system that is sized to be easily and readily positioned within a home or a smaller commercial environment, such as a hospital, doctor office, or dentist office, and that also provides for more affordable and economical repeated use within these environments. Such an ozone cleaning system would be advantageous because it would increase the availability of cleaning other personal items besides sport equipment with ozone, such as household items, medical items, and dental items, and thus provides an average consumer with a more sanitary lifestyle.